Steve is getting increasingly frustrated with Abdul. He feels like he’s running out of options and doesn’t know how else to support him. Abdul’s problem? He doesn’t seem able to plan.
“It’s not even like I’ve asked him to plan anything from scratch,” Steve explains on the phone to Abdul’s tutor. “He just needs to teach from the system. But every time he teaches, it’s like each slide in the PowerPoint is a surprise to him. He makes no effort to link activities together. I’m not sure he’s putting the effort in before the lesson.”
Meanwhile, Abdul is becoming increasingly despondent. Night after night he pores over the lessons on the system, trying to make sense of them. He writes notes beneath each PowerPoint slide and rereads the textbook, attempting to piece together what the lessons are really about, but he’s at a loss. He knows Steve is disappointed. He is too.
Abdul is not alone. Down the road at a neighbouring school, Carly is experiencing the same struggle, and her mentor Jasdeep is equally frustrated. This is not an isolated issue.
So why are beginning teachers finding it so hard to even deliver pre-prepared lessons? Is this really a problem with novice teacher or is something else going on underneath?
Where does planning happen?
Traditionally, curriculum planning has happened at three levels:
1. Long-Term Planning (The Big Picture)
This involves mapping out a curriculum overview over a year or key stage, ensuring progression and coherence in subject knowledge and skills.
2. Medium-Term Planning (The Unit View)
Medium-term planning breaks the long-term plan into topics or units, defining the learning objectives, sequencing lessons logically, and clarifying how learning will be assessed.
3. Short-Term Planning (The Enquiry or Lesson plan)
This is planning for individual lessons or shorter sequences (the enquiry): key knowledge, tasks and resources, questions and hinge points, adaptations, and timing.
For beginning teachers, medium-term planning is critical to understanding why a lesson exists and where it fits. Increasingly, however, this layer is missing or not explicitly shared. In some schools following centralised curricula created at Trust level, it may not even be accessible within departments
Where have all the objectives gone?
When beginning teachers are told that lessons are ‘on the system’, they often find folders crammed with PowerPoints, worksheets, and booklets. What they don’t find is clarity.
They express confusion about whether slides are included because they’re essential or simply because they’ve always been there. Where multiple amended versions exist, how do they judge which to use? Left without the planning that shaped the resources, they are forced to reverse‑engineer intentions from the materials alone.
This guessing game can feel impossible. Without explicitly shared objectives, beginning teachers are left asking fundamental questions:
- Is the lesson about conceptual understanding?
- Practising exam skills?
- Comparing interpretations?
- Understanding historical perspectives?
PowerPoints rarely reveal this. Resources are designed to support teaching—not replace the thinking that sits within planning. Without shared intentions, beginning teachers slip into a delivery mindset, clicking through slides with little sense of where to place the emphasis or introduce subject knowledge connections to develop coherence, or direction.
The consequences are significant. If the teacher isn’t clear on the lesson’s purpose, how can pupils be? Activities become disconnected from learning. Pupils may complete tasks successfully—but to what end? Without a clear destination, progress becomes uneven and assessment unfocused.
Rediscovering Objectives
A lesson plan is a map: it shows where you’re going (objectives), why you’re going there (rationale), and how you’ll know when you’ve arrived (outcomes). Abdul and Carly don’t just need to be told this, they need mentors to model it explicitly.
Support to reverse engineer the planning from the resource
Beginning teachers can be supported to identify the thinking behind existing resources in several practical ways:
- Joint planning: Mentor and mentee plan together using an established resource, with the mentor verbalising their thinking and, where needed, seeking clarification from the colleague who designed the lesson. This models collaborative practice and legitimises asking questions.
- Targeted observation: The beginning teacher observes an experienced colleague teaching from the same resource, with a focus on how emphasis, sequencing, and connections are made. A structured post‑observation discussion sharpens understanding. Useful prompts include:
What was the key takeaway?
Which activity did the heavy lifting in the learning?
- Structured planning proformas: Provide planning tools that force the beginning teacher to identify the lesson intent when using established resources (especially when the department uses PowerPoints as their main delivery tool), asking:
- What’s the big idea?
- What is the purpose of each task?
- Why is the sequence structured this way?
- What should pupils know or be able to do by the end?
Reintroducing objectives into you planning documentation/ lesson resources
All teachers (but especially novices and non‑specialists) benefit from explicit articulation of learning intentions.
- Share beginning teachers’ experiences to advocate for clearer planning within departments. Ask teachers working with the beginning teacher to explicitly share the lesson objectives whenever they organise for them to teach a class.
- Review medium‑term plans to ensure objectives, outcomes, and conceptual connections are made explicit.
- Annotate PowerPoints or resources with objectives, success criteria, and notes about checks for understanding (in slide notes or hidden slides, if preferred). This small step can transform a disconnected resource into a coherent lesson for a beginning teacher.
Articulating purpose
When we ask beginning teachers to “just teach from the system,” we usually do so with good intentions to reduce workload or ensuring consistency of experience for pupils. But without explicit objectives, this approach can undermine both teacher development and pupil learning.
It’s time we asked, “Where have all the objectives gone?” and reopened the conversation about what genuine planning looks like at the start of a teaching career. By reclaiming purpose from delivery, we better support our teachers and our pupils. Unfortunately there are few shortcuts to achieving this.
References/ Further Reading:
New, Novice or Nervous? 172: Curriculum planning. (2018). Teaching History (London), (172), 63.
Becoming a History Teacher 